


loyalty unyielding

by oxymoronic



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Backstory, M/M, On the Run, Oneshot, mild AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 17:16:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4674914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoronic/pseuds/oxymoronic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The disk lies on the sheet between them, innocuous and pastel blue.</p>
<p>“If we do this,” Napoleon says, “they will hunt us.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	loyalty unyielding

**Author's Note:**

> this came about after it occurred to me that they had no guarantee Waverly would protect them from a fairly treasonous decision - so, brief AU before the final scene, blended with some Napoleon headcanon backstory I already had.
> 
> there should be hovertext for translations of the Russian!

Hot Roman sunlight twines through the loose-slung curtains, disrupting the silent darkness of the room. They lie together on the bed, a foot apart, Napoleon’s eyes skywards, Illya’s on his folded hands. The disk lies on the sheet between them, innocuous and pastel blue.

“If we do this,” Napoleon says, “they will hunt us.”

Illya glances at him, frowns. “You blame me. I blame you.”

Napoleon snorts. “Your boys might believe you, but mine won’t. They’ll think I sold it to you. Or kept it, for bargaining or for profit.”

Illya scowls, lets this settle into his thoughts in silence. Napoleon can practically hear him thinking. “So we run,” he says, eventually.

Napoleon frowns. “Run?”

Illya lunges, kisses him, and the sharp edges of it leave him with blood between his teeth. “I will not kill you,” Illya says coarsely into his open mouth. That is, of course, how they got here, sprawled loose and clothesless across Napoleon’s rumpled bed. For better or for worse, they had surpassed the expectations of their handlers – or perhaps in truth they’d fallen short. Either way, when faced with shame or hate or treason, neither could still bring themselves to loose the bullet from his gun.

Napoleon breathes in, breathes out. “Okay,” he says. “We run.”

 

 

 

They go east. They chance a flight to Budapest, take advantage of their perceived headstart to put as far between themselves and Rome by plane as they dare, and then as soon as they hit the tarmac they jump ship onto the open road. Illya carjacks them a shitty little Opel with mismatched doors and a temperamental clutch, and the sight of his huge frame hulked behind the matchstick wheel puts Napoleon hilariously in mind of circuses. This, of course, he makes no effort to conceal.

They abandon the Kadet at the Yugoslavian border, and Napoleon lets Illya bullshit his way through an extortionate deal for a slightly more spacious Austin. It’s garish as hell and eats fuel like a bitch, but it gives Illya some much-desired headroom, and the radio comes as a total plus.

South, then; avoiding anything bigger than a hamlet, keeping to the back roads. Their advantage should come in the belief they’ll have tried to get as far from Rome as possible; by staying close for now, they should, _should_ manage to stay uncaught. But still, in this game it pays to be cautious.

Eventually, they hit the Chalkidiki, and hug the coast to Turkey. To then turn south again seems a crime – they’d have such rich pickings in Istanbul; but again, better to be safe. Even Napoleon won’t chance it.

Çanakkale; Burhaniye; Phocaea; İzmir; and then, two weeks out of Rome, they leave their beloved Austin behind to island-hop from Çeşme. The heat in the Aegean is blisteringly high, not turned aside even by the vicious Mediterranean breeze. The sunlight is thick and golden, a wet blanket curled warmly across their shoulders, and the boat they buy in Pefkos tastes like freedom.

 

 

 

To say they settle would be false, but for a time their thoughts turn from flight and into pleasure. Between the two of them, there is very little they cannot master, from carpentry to showbusiness; although Illya can’t dance to save his life, and Napoleon’s handymanship, outside of forgery, is hopeless.

Drifting from island to island, they gather money; make alliances; but above all, they stay quiet. Soon, the danger-safety of the Mediterranean won’t protect them, and they’ll have to train their sights further to the horizon.

 

 

 

“Córdoba,” Illya suggests. They’ve lucked their way into a pretty little villa on Anafi, rented for a week from a grizzled, tiny woman whose kitchen Illya had helped to retile. They’re sat poolside on a couple of deck chairs, watching the setting sun with a glass of wine in their hands. Not bad, as renegading goes. There’s a great deal about Napoleon’s life Illya is coming to understand.

Napoleon shakes his head. “Not Argentina,” he insists, as always. “How about Shanghai?”

Illya looks at him flatly. “You speak Chinese?”

Napoleon shrugs. “I didn’t speak Russian a month ago.”

“You still cannot speak Russian,” Illya replies, and Napoleon rolls his eyes. “Don’t you think we might be...” He gestures with his wine-free hand. “... inconspicuous?”

Napoleon narrows his eyes. “Тебе не кажется, что я знаю что делаю?” he asks. The accent, as ever, needs practice, but Illya concedes the point in peevish silence. The past three months have been a brief but concise education as to why precisely the efforts of even four international agencies couldn’t pin Napoleon Solo down.

“We shouldn’t have destroyed that disk,” Napoleon says with a sigh for the hundredth time, settling back in his chair and closing his eyes. The dying sunlight slants litanies over the sharp angles of his skin, and even after all this time Illya can’t help but stare. “We could’ve bought this island if we’d kept it.”

“Yes,” Illya agrees dryly. “Until whoever we sold it to tore the sky in half.”

“Whomever,” Napoleon corrects, without feeling. He cracks open a single eye. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to stare?”

Illya’s mouth flickers briefly with his amusement. “Didn’t yours teach you not to dress like фермер свиней?” he counters lightly.

“ _Ouch_ ,” Napoleon says, and mock-winces in reply. A heavy hand settles on his sternum, gently strips away the seemingly-offensive shirt; Napoleon arches into its touch with a contented sound, opens his eyes again to bring Illya’s face looming into view, kneeling at his side. “Look at you,” he murmurs, tracing the sloping line of his jaw with his thumb. “Problem-solving.”

“I read book,” Illya replies wryly as his hand skims ever-south.

“Oh, yeah?” Napoleon asks around the growing tightness of his breath. “Was it a long one?”

Then Illya’s hand dips below his waist, hits the seam of his rough-cut pants, and he allows himself to be silenced for a time.

 

 

 

Later, sated, sprawled messily across the bedsheets. It’s too hot to sleep, too late to think, but Illya’s fingers are still sketching the shape of his skin in the halflight, following the twisted, ragged scar winding beside Napoleon’s spine. “You still haven’t told me about this,” Illya says, and they’re lying too close for Napoleon to mask his brief surprise.

“Did I promise to?” Napoleon asks evenly. He’s stretched out on his stomach, catlike, taking up more than his half of the mattress. Illya doesn’t mind. He sees no profit in pushing if Napoleon doesn’t want to give, so he lets it slide, takes back his hand and settles it on his thigh. Then: “They didn’t tell you how I got caught?”

Illya glances at him, surprised. “CIA did this to you?”

“No,” Napoleon easily replies. “They don’t like to do anything quite so... permanent.” He smiles, but it’s humorless. “Much harder to hide at the inquiry.”

There’s a pause; Illya can’t bring himself to ask. “KGB?” he manages, eventually, and Illya thinks Napoleon must taste his relief when he rolls over, shakes his head. The motion is telling; Illya senses that he’s already pushed too far. He still, of course, lacks his answer, but somehow he doesn’t seem to mind. “Does it still hurt?”

“Only my ego,” Napoleon answers, amused, as he closes his eyes. “It’s such an ugly-looking thing.”

 

 

The September stormclouds hit them with a vengeance, and they acknowledge in silence that it’s time. They head back to the mainland, gift the _Ηλιαχτίδα_ with a new owner, and make good on their best remaining plan: a winter spent quietly in Auckland, a world away, or so the thinking goes, from either America or Russia.

They take it in stages, for safety’s sake; Dalaman; Cairo; Jeddah; Karachi; Kolkata; and then finally long-haul from Hong Kong. The air, when they finally hit tarmac, is sharp against their skin, bright with the promise of the dawning spring, and it settles comfortably in Napoleon’s chest.

That is, of course, until he turns the corner into Customs and finds a familiar small-shouldered figure waiting there for him.

The incoming crowd is thick enough for him to grab Illya by the arm and drag him to one side, but they’re trapped, they’re trapped, they’re so _fucked_ , they’re in an airport on an island and there’s nowhere for them to run. 

They find a door to hide behind, for all the good it’ll do them, a boxy, ill-lit janitor’s closet shoved at the end of the hall. Illya doesn’t need an explanation. “Did they see us?”

“I can’t imagine how she might have missed us,” Napoleon replies. _She_ doesn’t make Illya flinch, but it might as well have, given how well Napoleon knows to read the taut snap of his jaw. “Besides, she was waiting for us. She knows we’re here.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve been chased; they’ve had to scatter from a few unpaid rooms, jump ship at a moment’s notice, and, even on one memorable occasion, hotfoot it off the hotel roof. They’d had a tail in west Bengal; they’d both thought they’d lost him. Evidently, they were wrong.

“What now?” Illya asks. His shoulders are roughly arched; his hands have fallen into fists, hanging loosely at his sides. Illya knows as well as he does that they’re pinned.

Napoleon hesitates, closes his eyes, thinks. Their choices are unflattering; the airport will be surrounded, and they’ll have people on every flight. But they’ve less chance of escape if they’re trapped on a plane, and Napoleon knows better than most that even the tightest noose can slip.

“Into the city,” he decides. “Then we drive south. Maybe find a boat.” He pauses, glances across to meet his eyes. “You know it would be safer if – ”

“No,” Illya hisses, furious. They’ve been here before, more times than he can count. “You _know_. We run together, or not at all.”

Napoleon breathes in, breathes out. “Alright,” he says. “Then let’s go.”

They don’t even make it down the hall. Four steps out of the closet door, and Napoleon goes down beside him, a heavy heap crumpling down onto the floor, and Illya cannot, will not, run.

“Успокоиться,” a voice says, the Russian clumsy, hazy and swimming through his building rage, “это только наркотики – ” 

– and sure enough he finds it, plain as day, the needleprick tiny on his neck but otherwise unharmed. Illya’s eyes track down the barrel of Gaby’s gun, trained steadily at his temple, to her hands, her face, her neck. “So now you know,” she says, and lowers it, slides it back into its holster. “We aren’t here to kill you.”

Two clashing logics; they can’t want them alive, but if the facts were otherwise, they would indeed long since be dead. A dread-heavy jolt slices through him as he realizes what alive they might want them _for_ –  

“Not torture, either,” she quickly says, and Illya finds himself two steps closer to her before he even realizes he’s moved. The gun is up again, steady as a knife’s edge and trained towards his forehead. No room for wounding here.

Illya feels the soft pinprick of a needle at his neck, and then he’s on his knees, his limbs liquefying swiftly as unconsciousness bubbles through him.

“We just have a proposition for you both, is all,” Waverly says.

 

 

 

Later. Post propositions, apologies, and explanations, Illya finds Waverly smoking a cigarette on the roof, alone save for the scratchy gull-shrieks rising from the nearby port. “Horrible things,” Waverly says around a mouthful of smoke, and gives him one.

“That was a hell of a merry chase you had us on, Agent Kuryakin,” Waverly continues, stifling a heavy yawn. “You have no idea how much of a bureaucratic nightmare it is getting agents out of Singapore.” Illya, indeed, does not, and so has nothing to offer in response to this ostensible non sequitur. He finishes the cigarette; Waverly passes him another, unprompted. “Still,” he adds, as he too lights a second, “damn sight less messy than the last time we tried to catch the bastard.”

Tiredness and curiosity finally overcome his own reserve, and Illya can no longer resist. He asks.

Waverly takes in a deep drag, throws up pale blue smoke into the darkening air. “He’d had a partner – a friend from the army, I think. Unpleasant chap, by all accounts.” A rhythmic pause; inhale, exhale. “Anyhow, they’d been on the run together for what, maybe a year and a half?, when he stabs Solo in the back – quite literally – and runs off with all their money. He was found half-dead in the park next morning. By a couple of joggers, I believe.” Waverly grimaces faintly. “Nasty business.”

For a moment, Illya cannot breathe. The answers were all there. He had not stopped to see them.

Waverly finishes his cigarette. Illya, suddenly, is so tired he can barely stand. “Where is he now?”

“Not sure. We didn’t bother much – Solo was the one we wanted. South America, I think, maybe – ”

– but Illya knows, Illya knows before he even says it, and in a way, he’s always known. He just hadn’t cared to listen.

 

 

 

They – Gaby – Waverly – _someone_ has seen fit to give them an apartment, a modest little two-bed above a slaughterhouse in Epsom. Napoleon, of course, is cooking, frying two fatty lamb steaks, and though the thought of eating five minutes before had left Illya queasy, suddenly he’s starving.

“Oh, good,” Napoleon says. “You’re not dead. If you still have all your fingernails, you can be useful and set the table.”

Illya comes up behind him, untucks Napoleon’s shirt to run spring-cold fingers up his spine. He finds the scar, rests his hand against it, and beneath him Napoleon goes completely still.

“You’ve been asking questions,” Napoleon says lightly.

“Waverly,” Illya confirms. Napoleon reaches forward, switches off the stove, and the silent absence of the spitting meat is jarring. He slips the steaks onto two waiting plates, already filled with vegetables, and Illya gives him room enough to slide out and take them over to the rickety, unset table.

Neither of them sits. “You’re not him,” Napoleon says, after a while, a dishcloth wrung taut between his hands. He rolls his shoulders, shifts his feet. “And besides. I had it coming.”

The shock and rage must sit plainly on his face; Napoleon can no longer meet his eye, stares resolutely down at his bunched-up hands instead. “You’re forgetting how I got here, Peril,” Napoleon says, amused, glancing up to look at him. “I wasn’t exactly the nicest person.”

Illya closes his eyes, shakes his head. His brain is sludge-heavy and twisted with exhaustion; he can’t put together words to get across the wrongness of this thinking. Four months of running to find they fled nothing but a life they wanted; four months of running to still feel unfooted, unbalanced beside this tangle of a man.

“Come on,” Napoleon says quietly, at last. “Enough. Let’s eat.”

They do. The food, as always, is excellent. Beneath the table, their ankles brush.

“So,” Napoleon says, smiling slightly. “U.N.C.L.E.”

They’ve put another three years on his sentence, Illya knows. In the circumstances it feels like mercy.


End file.
